Conventionally, the so-called conductive glass is well known as a transparent conductive thin layer, which comprises a glass and an indium oxide thin layer formed thereon. Since the conductive glass has a glass substrate, however, it has low flexibility or workability and cannot be used for certain purposes. In recent years, therefore, transparent conductive films using various types of plastic films such as polyethylene terephthalate films as their substrate have been used, because of their advantages such as good impact resistance and light weight as well as flexibility and workability.
However, the transparent conductive films using such film substrates have low surface scratch resistance, so that they can have problems in which they can get scratched to have an increased electrical resistance or suffer from disconnection during use. Thus, there is a problem in which the inferior properties of the conventional transparent conductive thin layers can make the life of touch panels short.
Against the problem with scratch resistance, it has been proposed that a hard-coating layer is formed on one side of a transparent film substrate (see Patent Literature 1 below). Although the transparent conductive film having the hard-coating layer as described in Patent Literature 1 can have somewhat improved scratch resistance, there have been higher requirements for such properties.
Patent Literature 1: Japanese Patent No. 2667686